My father, Peter, died on Tuesday 19th of April 2017 at Nelson Tasman Hospice.
We are having a morning (or "mourning") tea, as my sister Barb keeps calling it, at Club Waimea in the Barnicoat Room this Saturday the 22nd at 10.30am (map here).
No flowers, please (they will just create a problem for my mother, Joan, to have to dispose of later), but donations to Nelson Tasman Hospice Trust (here) or to St John's (here) would be spectacular.
There will be no funeral as my father has donated his body to Otago Medical School for research and student learning.
If you can't be there this Saturday, but have a memory of Peter that you would like to share, please message me, and I will share it with the group. I will also be posting a web address for online tributes to be lodged once receive it from the undertakers.
My father didn't expect to live to 80: I suspect that he thought, that like his parents, that he would make an early exit from this world.
However, the relentless shaving of seconds from the cosmological clock had him suddenly realise that he had - bewilderingly - managed an innings of 80 in May 2014.
We felt that such an important event should not go unheralded, so we threw a party, and took lots of photos.
I was at that time deep in finalising my Master's thesis, so was going to compile a photobook when I got time.
We had the photos, I was just lacking some space to devote to the task. My teaching load suddenly went ballistic as one management lecturer left one week out from the start of Semester two, 2014. I had the capacity to devote more hours to teaching as my study load had dropped, so added two more papers, and arranged to teach summer school.
As a result, there as not much headspace available for creativity, so this project slowed to an almost stop... but there was slow progress.
In May 2015, I at last finished the album. I made a video of the album, which can be viewed here:
My father was delighted to receive a hardback book for his birthday, as was our once-estranged cousin Kim.
My next little project is to make a better flipbook than the momento one that I posted on 30 April (as it only shows the left-hand pages!) of the great 80th birthday, hoping that this too will not take another year to finalise.
This is still in progress, and I will post an update as soon as it is complete!
